Development of a Pulsar-Based Time-Scale

By G. Hobbs, William A. Coles, R. Manchester, M. Keith, R. Shannon, D. Chen, M. Bailes, N. D. Ramesh Bhat, S. Burke-Spolaor, David J. Champion and 14 more. 2012

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Using observations of pulsars from the Parkes Pulsar Timing Array (PPTA) project we develop the first pulsar-based time-scale that has a precision comparable to the uncertainties in International Atomic Time-scales (TAI). Our ensemble of pulsars provides an Ensemble Pulsar Scale (EPS) analogous to the free atomic time-scale Echelle Atomique Libre. The EPS can be used to detect fluctuations in atomic time-scales and therefore can lead to a new realization of Terrestrial Time, TT(PPTA11). We successfully follow features known to affect the frequency of the TAI, and we find marginally significant differences between TT(PPTA11) and TT(BIPM11). We discuss the various phenomena that lead to a correlated signal in the pulsar timing residuals and therefore limit the stability of the pulsar time-scale.

Subfields: Aerospace Engineering, Astronomy and Astrophysics, Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c6990e008a1fb5b409154d7fcd2ef9e25d80f9a9

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Citations in the corpus

The Parkes Pulsar Timing Array Project (2006, methodology): “Hobbs et al. (2012) used Parkes timing data for 19 pulsars spanning up to 17 years, including nearly six years of PPTA data, to establish the pulsar timescale TT(PPTA11).”
The International Pulsar Timing Array: First Data Release (2016, background): “(i) A monopolar signal, which affects all pulsars equally, would be caused by an error in the Earth-based time standards.1 Recently, Hobbs et al. (2012) used PTA data to constrain this signal.”
Timing analysis for 20 millisecond pulsars in the Parkes Pulsar Timing Array (2015, background): “You et al. 2007; Keith et al. 2013, hereafter K13), developing pulsar-based time standards (e.g. Hobbs et al. 2012), and precise measurements of properties of the pulsars themselves (e.g. Verbiest et al. 2008, hereafter V08).”
The NANOGrav 15 yr Data Set: Evidence for a Gravitational-wave Background (2023, background): “…time-dependent Roemer delays with dipolar correlations (Roebber 2019; Vallisneri et al. 2020), and errors in the correction of telescope time to an inertial timescale (Hobbs et al. 2012, 2020) create an identical time-dependent delay for all pulsars (i.e., a delay with monopolar correlations).”
Testing Relativistic Gravity with Radio Pulsars (2014, background): “ 2). Fast rotating pulsars with small P_ (millisecond pulsars) appear to be particularly stable in their rotation. On long time-scales, some of them rival the best atomic clocks in terms of stability [23, 24]. This property makes them ideal tools for precision astrometry, and hence (most) gravity te”
European Pulsar Timing Array Limits On An Isotropic Stochastic Gravitational-Wave Background (2015, methodology): “Hobbs et al. (2012) showed that a PTA is sensitive to errors in the time standard used to measure the arrival times of pulses.”
Searching for the Nano-Hertz Stochastic Gravitational Wave Background with the Chinese Pulsar Timing Array Data Release I (2023, background): “…to detect GWs (Hellings & Downs 1983; Jenet et al. 2005), measure masses (Champion et al. 2010; Caballero et al. 2018) and orbital elements of solar system planets (Guo et al. 2019), and study the stability of international (Hobbs et al. 2012, 2020) and local (Li et al. 2020) atomic time standards.”